A terrible thing can have good consequences. It can be a clarifying moment. An obvious example is the Japanese sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The event was a human tragedy and a terrible blow to the United States militarily. It left the U.S. interests and people in the Philippines at the mercy of the Japanese armed forces. But it galvanized the country to such an extent that millions of young American men immediately enlisted in the armed forces and everyone else steeled themselves for the imminent war.
So, that’s the archetype. Now drop your sights ten levels down and observe a clarifying moment on a much smaller stage. Over the last couple of years, the left has been using the persistence of internet records to banish anyone who has ever said anything that is now politically incorrect. An example that comes to mind is the libertarian journalist Kevin Williamson who was hired and fired by the Atlantic over the course of a few hours because some left-wing trolls dug out his anti-abortion tweets and shamed the Atlantic into firing him. Of late, the right has been trying to use the same trick. Mike Cernovich produced a very large number of tweets by Hollywood director James Gunn that flippantly espoused pedophilic opinions. His employer, Disney, terminated him immediately. And most relevantly, The New York Times fired Quinn Norton, a white woman, back in February for having twitter comments that people thought were racist or anti-gay.
Now comes Sarah Jeong. She was just hired for seemingly the same job that Quinn Norton was fired from and the evidence of anti-white racism in Jeong’s Twitter feed is more than knee deep. In fact, it seems to be practically an obsession. A mountain of quotes has been circulating on this situation. The New York Times answered these criticisms by saying that Jeong was just responding in kind to racists and she will not be penalized because of it. So, it’s official. The New York times will fire white people if there is even a pretext for calling them biased but it will ignore even blatant anti-white racism by non-whites. For the average reader of this blog I don’t think any of this is a shock. Basically, it’s business as usual at “the Gray Lady.” But who it might shock are normies. They may have thought that we are all equal in front of the internet mob. They might have imagined that the New York Times would always prefer to avoid the appearance of harboring an openly racist employee. Well, if they’re paying any attention at all to the details of this case they will see that they were wrong and the New York Times didn’t. That should be a clarifying moment. The New York Times says it’s okay for a non-white journalist to openly express racial hatred against white people.
It occurs to me that the correct way to handle this is not to complain to the New York Times. They obviously don’t care. But how about their advertisers. Would for instance, a company like Disney respond to complaints from its customers by pulling ads from the New York Times? How about Walmart? Could they be persuaded to pull ads? Seems like a worthwhile thing to do. But at least it’s clear who the New York Times cares about and who it despises. Clarification noted.